One of the key issues in video manipulation is video abstraction in the form of skimmed video. For this purpose, an important task is to determine the content significance of each chunk of frames in a video sequence. Content significance is related to those portions of the video sequence that are likely to attract the attention of observers. To this end, motion attention models to assist in determining content significance of video sequence portions are greatly desired. The following systems and methods are directed to addressing this need for useful motion attention to determine which elements of a video data sequence are likely to attract human attention.